Narcissistic Injury and Rage, Writ Large

A description of a narcissist (links removed):

Any threat (real or imagined) to the narcissist's grandiose and fantastic self-perception (False Self) as perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and entitled to special treatment and recognition, regardless of his actual accomplishments (or lack thereof). The narcissist actively solicits Narcissistic Supply – adulation, compliments, admiration, subservience, attention, being feared – from others in order to sustain his fragile and dysfunctional Ego. Thus, he constantly courts possible rejection, criticism, disagreement, and even mockery. The narcissist is, therefore, dependent on other people. He is aware of the risks associated with such all-pervasive and essential dependence. He resents his weakness and dreads possible disruptions in the flow of his drug – Narcissistic Supply. He is caught between the rock of his habit and the hard place of his frustration. No wonder he is prone to raging, lashing and acting out, and to pathological, all-consuming envy (all expressions of pent-up aggression). The narcissist is constantly on the lookout for slights. He is hypervigilant. He perceives every disagreement as criticism and every critical remark as complete and humiliating rejection – nothing short of a threat. Gradually, his mind turns into a chaotic battlefield of paranoia and ideas of reference. Most narcissists react defensively. They become conspicuously indignant, aggressive, and cold. They detach emotionally for fear of yet another (narcissistic) injury. They devalue the person who made the disparaging remark, the critical comment, the unflattering observation, the innocuous joke at the narcissist's expense. By holding the critic in contempt, by diminishing the stature of the discordant conversant – the narcissist minimises the impact of the disagreement or criticism on himself. This is a defence mechanism known as cognitive dissonance.

Mike Whitney explains why Israel invaded Gaza: in preparation for another invasion of Lebanon, to avenge the humiliating loss there in 2006.

That's the real goal. Israel has never recovered from its defeat at the hands of Hezbollah during the 33 Day war in 2006, so it is planning to restart hostilities. The attack on Gaza is just a "dry run" to strengthen morale and put the finishing touches on the battle plan. That's why there's such a disparity between the implicit risks of the current operation and its minuscule strategic gains. It's not really Hamas in the cross-hairs, but Hezbollah; and this time, Israel hopes to crush them with overwhelming force. The massive week-long aerial bombardment of Gaza; the pounding by heavy artillery units, and the deployment of elite troops and armored divisions, all presage a massive Normandy-type invasion of Lebanon with the probability of high casualties.

Continuing on. Why? Because Israel feels entitled to own land currently belonging to other people.

The upcoming war with Lebanon has less to do with Hezbollah than it does with Israel's geopolitical ambitions. Israel wants to establish a new northern border at the Litani River in southern Lebanon and create an "Israel-friendly" regime in Beirut. The plan to annex the land south of the Litani River dates back to the founding of the Jewish state when Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described the country’s future borders this way: "To the north the Litani River, the southern border will be pushed into the Sinai, and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan."

In 1978, the IDF launched Operation Litani with the intention of annexing the southern part of Lebanon and setting up a Christian client-regime in Beirut that would take orders from Tel Aviv. Israel said that it needed a "buffer zone" for its security, the same excuse that it uses today. The 1982 invasion devolved into an 18-year onslaught which ravaged the Lebanese economy and killed more than 20,000 civilians. In 2000, Israel was driven from Lebanon by the region's newest guerrilla militia, Hezbollah.

Israel's territorial objectives have not changed. They want to seize more land to achieve their vision of "Greater Israel" and reduce adjacent Arab countries to a "permanent state of colonial dependency".

This explains why Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and communications network were intentionally targeted. Israel requires its neighbors to languish in abject poverty and hopelessness. By destroying Lebanon's life-support systems, Israel figured it would eliminate a potential rival while establishing itself as the dominant power in the Middle East. This same template for "total war" is being used in Gaza where mosques, schools, media offices, sea ports, girl's dormitories, ambulances and vital infrastructure have been destroyed while international media, doctors and the Red Crescent have been refused entry. The rules of war have been abandoned altogether.

Read the details about the massacre in Zeitoun. This is where the four starving children were found lying by their mothers' corpses four days after the attack.

Israel raided Zeitoun on Sunday, quickly establishing its control. The town occupies a strategic location south of Gaza City, and will be used should the IDF launch an attack on the city proper. According to survivors, after invading the IDF compelled extended families to gather in centrally located buildings, marching families at gunpoint from one building to the next. The IDF told the residents of Zeitoun that they were being led to houses that would not be bombed. But in at least once case, it has emerged that the IDF forced some 110 Palestinians into a house that was then bombed within 24 hours, killing perhaps 70 people, all civilians. Aid workers only discovered the corpses after being prevented for four days by the IDF from visiting the neighborhood in Zeitoun. Those in the building, which has been described as a "warehouse" by one survivor, were left inside without food or water. After one day, three men attempted to venture out to find food. They were immediately hit by a barrage of IDF fire. At that point, a missile hit the rooftop of the warehouse.

Read a description of narcissistic rage:

Narcissists can be imperturbable, resilient to stress, and sangfroid. Narcissistic rage is not a reaction to stress it is a reaction to a perceived slight, insult, criticism, or disagreement (in other words, to narcissistic injury). It is intense and disproportional to the "offence". Raging narcissists usually perceive their reaction to have been triggered by an intentional provocation with a hostile purpose. Their targets, on the other hand, invariably regard raging narcissists as incoherent, unjust, and arbitrary.

We are dealing with a country, Israel, whose leaders and some considerable portion of its population exhibit a severe mental health problem. Consider the opinion of a political psychologist:

Political psychologist and former deputy Mehmet Bekaroğlu can be labeled a concerned left-wing intellectual when it comes to the Palestinian tragedy. Bekaroğlu thinks the imagery being aired on world televisions will have a deep and permanent effect on the psychologies of future generations, particularly with respect to how they perceive the Israeli and Jewish identity. "You don't need to be a psychologist to see this; I assume that the Israelis have well-educated psychologists to analyze the impact of their activities on world public opinion," he told Sunday's Zaman. Bekaroğlu thinks Israel is intentionally trying to create an impact on the psychologies of future generations. "They are trying to create a psychology of despair, a psychology of slavery. They want people to think that they can do nothing against Israel, that they are helpless vis-à-vis Israel. They realized that they cannot have the world accept their existence and ambitions with love, so they are having the world accept them through hatred and fear," he claimed.

Narcissistic supply = attention. Negative, positive. It doesn't matter.

NS includes all forms of attention - both positive and negative: fame, notoriety, adulation, fear, applause, approval. Whenever the narcissist gets attention, positive or negative, whenever he is in the "limelight", it constitutes NS. If he can manipulate people or influence them – positively or negatively – it qualifies as NS. Even quarrelling with people and confronting them constitute NS. Perhaps not the conflict itself, but the narcissist's ability to influence other people, to make them feel the way he wants, to manipulate them, to make them do something or refrain from doing it - all count as forms of narcissistic supply. Hence the phenomenon of "serial litigators".

And what is the answer? It is to remove attention.

The narcissist seeks out his old Sources of Narcissistic Supply when he has absolutely no other NS Sources at his disposal. Narcissists frantically try to recycle their old and wasted sources in such a situation. But the narcissist would not do even that had he not felt that he could still successfully extract a modicum of NS from the old source (even to attack the narcissist is to recognise his existence and to attend to him!!!). If you are an old Source of Narcissistic Supply, first, get over the excitement of seeing him again. It may be flattering, perhaps sexually arousing. Try to overcome these feelings. Then, simply ignore him. Don't bother to respond in any way to his offer to get together. If he talks to you – keep quiet, don't answer. If he calls you – listen politely and then say goodbye and hang up. Return his gifts unopened. Indifference is what the narcissist cannot stand. It indicates a lack of attention and interest that constitutes the kernel of negative NS to be avoided.

So what to do? We cannot remove attention from the activities of this mental case state. But we can reframe how we speak about the Middle East.

The aim is to adopt one common set of expressions and words when engaging the mainstream media, with the hope of instituting a linguistic and therefore conceptual framework for thinking and talking about the struggle that can compete with the well-honed and carefully crafted language of the Israel-first propaganda machine.

Moreover, the use of an alternative lexicon will quickly highlight that the prevailing language used to talk about the Palestinian struggle is not at all "neutral": calling the Israeli army the "Israeli Occupation Forces" rather than the "Israeli Defense Forces", for instance, challenges the basic premise that underlies all Israeli justifications for violence against Palestinians: that Israel is only defending itself rather than aggressively engaging in a the colonization of a whole people.

Somehow the mentally defective state needs to be cut off from it's primary narcissistic supply, which is right here in the US. Congress, corporations, banks, etc.



Frikkin ridiculous.

The third Intifada being urged now has to be our intifada too. As Israel steps up its destruction of the Palestinian people, we need to step up our reconstruction of our resistance, our movements, of our communities in our own counties, where so many of us live in alienation and isolation. We need to be the third intifada – people here need more and say repeatedly that they need more than the demonstrations, because they are not stopping the killing here. Demonstrations alone, are not stopping the killing here. The arms companies making the weapons that are targeting people here, the companies that are selling stolen goods from occupied land pillaging settlements, the companies building the apartheid wall, the prisons, the East Jerusalem Light Railway system. These companies, Carmel Agrexco, Caterpillar, Veolia, Raytheon, EDO, BAE Systems, they are complicit in the crimes against humanity being committed here. If the international community will not uphold international law, then a popular movement should and can – we can use the legal system of international law as one of many means to hold on to our collective humanity.

So let's do it. It's time to expose the corruption. It's time to expose that blood-soaked tube carrying narcissistic supply, connected to the oxygen tank called money, and shut it off once and for all.